Collection Processing. Single essence, multiple manifestations

Вадим Винник

Along the whole history of programming, sequential elementwise processing of various kinds of collections has been and still is one of the most common practical tasks. Internal representation of the collections, as well as the algorithm used to fetch subsequent elements, may vary in a very wide range: array, linked list, tree, hash table, file et al. However, behind the variety of idioms, standard library functions, ad-hoc solutions, one can reveal the essence that remains invariant for that whole class of tasks. This talk aims to show a step-by-step transition from algorithms based on explicit description of actions over individual elements towards high-level, declarative processing tools that treat a collection as an entity and adequately reveal the logic of the domain.